The story of Curtis Priem, the Nvidia co-founder who could have been one of the richest people in the United States
The first CTO of the company that rose to fame for its incredible computer graphics sold his shares to his alma mater, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Curtis Priem wanders across a wooden stage before stopping a few feet to the right of center. It is one of the “acoustic sweet spots” of the 1,165-seat Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Concert Hall , which was built between 2003 and 2008 thanks to a $40 million donation from Nvidia’s co-founder . Bathed in warm stage lights, Priem, 64, dressed in a suit and red tie, gestures toward the thousands of unique curved wood panels that line the walls and the tightly woven fabric specifically tuned for air permeability and the mass in the ceiling, all built for ideal acoustics. “This is the most technically advanced performance space in the world ,” smiles the electrical engineer, describing the venue named after him: the Curtis Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center .
It’s part of a much larger commitment to his alma mater that recently includes helping it become the first university in the world to host an IBM Quantum System One computer . Expected to be operational next spring, it will be the cornerstone of a new computing center that will hopefully help RPI and the surrounding area attract top talent .
Since 2001, Priem has donated $275 million to RPI , representing 40% of RPI’s total donations during that period, and has pledged approximately $80 million more . Only half of that amount has been publicly acknowledged as Priem’s gift. RPI announced an anonymous $360 million pledge in 2001, when Priem began donating, but neither he nor the school would comment on whether he is the donor .
What is even less known is Priem’s own story. Inventor of nearly 200 patents , he helped design the first graphics processor for PCs in the early 1980s and later co-founded the semiconductor company Nvidia , where he spent a decade working as its first chief technology officer .
Following Nvidia’s initial public offering in 1999, it transferred most of its shares to a charitable foundation, after deciding it was an «excessive amount of money» to keep. A few years later he left the company, in part due to a highly litigious first marriage that ended in divorce and accusations of domestic violence against his ex-wife . In 2006 he had sold his remaining shares. If he had kept his entire stake, he would be worth $70 billion . Instead, Forbes estimates that Priem has a fortune close to $30 million , just over a tenth of what he has given to RPI.
That includes a $6 million home near Fremont, California , where he lives offline with unreliable cell service and writes “manifestos” filled with equations about how to solve global problems like “repairing the Earth.” (None have been published anywhere.) He says he often communicates by giving unique email addresses : strings of sixteen-digit numbers, including one provided to this Forbes reporter, as a way to avoid spam (he says he hasn’t received any since 2000). . He also owns a Gulfstream G450 private jet , named Snoopy, which he purchased in 2021 and now uses to fly to RPI four times a year.
In an interview on RPI’s campus in Troy, New York, Priem talks about his donations, why he left Nvidia, and some regrets. “I did a little crazy thing and I wish I had held on to a little more [of Nvidia stock] ,” admits Priem, who says he still thinks about Nvidia twice a day as he puts on and takes off his Omega Speedmaster X Mars Whatch , the same watch worn by Thunderbirds and space shuttle astronauts. It was a gift from Nvidia on the fifth anniversary of their company. For him, RPI has become the place not only to invest his money, but also to find meaning and solace. “There was hell happening to me outside and [RPI] was really my refuge ,” Priem says of his work with RPI, where he has served on the board of directors since 2003. “It became my purpose and my sanity.” .
Riem chose RPI over the better-known Massachusetts Institute of Technology thanks in part to having a fancy IBM computer he wanted to use. It turned out to be an ideal place for Priem, who had always been interested in the intersection of technology and the arts. In high school, after moving “all over the East Coast” as a child, his family settled outside Cleveland , where Priem took cello lessons with Donald White of the Cleveland Orchestra , the first black musician to play. in a major orchestra, and spent two summers at an intensive camp for classical musicians in North Carolina. He also played the trombone. At RPI, he played cello in his orchestra all four years and attributes much of his creativity in the electronics industry and his work at RPI to his musical education. “To act you have to practice, right? And you have to be creative ,” says Priem. «So I started applying that to electronics and computing . »
He graduated from RPI with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 1982 and began working as a staff engineer for PC company Vermont Microsystems , followed by a stint as a hardware engineer at electronic test equipment company GenRad . He later moved to California to work at Sun Microsystems for seven years.
The idea for Nvidia emerged in 1993 at a Denny’s in Silicon Valley . That’s where he, his Sun Microsystems colleague Chris Malachowsky , and his friend Jensen Huang , an engineer who worked at LSI Logic , would meet to brainstorm how to build a better chip . Priem describes his role from the beginning as the architect who created the underlying model that allowed engineers to design algorithms for Nvidia chips, working primarily behind the scenes. “At Nvidia there was a saying that they would never put Curtis in front of a camera and they would never put Curtis in front of a client ,” Priem jokes. (CEO Huang’s response: «Curtis was really great with customers .»)
In 1999, Nvidia made two major breakthroughs: it went public with a market capitalization of $1.1 billion and invented its graphics processing unit , or GPU , which was initially used for video game editing but ultimately reshaped the industry. computing. That July, Priem also married his first wife, Veronica , and two months later, he established the Priem Family Foundation in which he invested more than three-quarters of his 12.8% stake (in the IPO) in Nvidia , around 100 million shares (on current share count). Part of the reason for the big gift, he said, was that he didn’t want the government to receive the money if he had sold a bunch of stocks and owed taxes on them .
It was also around this time that Priem looked at his shareholding and thought he would end up with around $50 million . «What saved me was that I couldn’t predict the future ,» he says with some nostalgia about his decision to sell shares in the company that is now valued at $1.2 trillion (market capitalization).
After initially donating to a handful of causes, including The Nature Conservancy and the Monterey Bay Aquarium , Priem moved away from his goal of alleviating human-induced suffering to preventing it, primarily through donations focused on education. «Adam and Eve had free will and chose a sinful path that caused suffering… our belief is that most suffering can be avoided since it is within our control to begin with ,» says their foundation’s first website, based on in his family’s beliefs in the Church (Priem does not practice religion, but his father, his sister and his grandparents were all great leaders, he says).
In 2000, Priem returned to RPI to receive the university’s Entrepreneur of the Year award for his work at Nvidia. “I walked onto campus and thought, okay, this is my calling ,” Priem says. It says it donated $1 million to RPI in 2000 and again in 2001. Then, in the fiscal year ending June 2002, the Priem Family Foundation began disbursing at least $10 million a year to RPI, and has continued doing it since then .
Meanwhile, things at Nvidia were not going so well . According to Priem, he was distracted by personal issues at home and wasn’t working at the level he wanted, so he left.
The next decade of Priem’s life was a disaster, he says: A court determined that Veronica had a «history of domestic violence» against him . He alleged in 2013 court documents that the violence had “resulted in 19 written police reports, five arrests, three criminal convictions, three criminal protective orders, one civil temporary restraining order, and three periods of probation.” According to the same document, Veronica claimed that Curtis “triggered her violent reactions by verbally provoking her” and mentioned a “lack of severity associated with her misconduct . ” (Her attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) At one point, Curtis Priem says he met with California State Senator Bob Wieckowski to advocate for an amendment that would make it more difficult for alleged perpetrators of domestic violence to receive spousal support . The amendment, SB 28 , passed unanimously in a Senate vote in 2015. His ex-wife pleaded no contest to misdemeanor domestic violence and he never paid spousal support.
Throughout this time, Priem continued to help RPI, which he claimed had “faltered” financially for decades. He wanted to help “turn this super tanker around . ” First, his donations went to the essentials: hiring more professors, building renovations and acquiring laboratory equipment. Then came contributions to what is now the Shirley Ann Jackson Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies and the performing arts center, which opened in 2008.
The idea for his biggest contribution yet came just a few months ago at a board retreat in Carlsbad, California. That’s where Priem suggested to RPI’s new president, Martin Schmidt , that they try to bring a quantum computer to RPI , an interesting idea but one that Schmidt thought would be too expensive.
«We left Carlsbad with me and agreed that I would drive to see Dario Gil, the head of research at IBM… to see if we could convince him that IBM should install a quantum computer on the RPI campus ,» Schmidt told Forbes. Just three months later, in June, RPI formally announced plans to bring an IBM Quantum System One computer to campus next year, making it the only university in the world to host one.
“Now, with quantum computers, RPI will be at the forefront of introducing an entirely new computing paradigm that offers profound possibilities for the exploration of a variety of previously intractable problems in areas such as materials design, sustainability, pharmaceutical development, medical care and health. much more ,” Gil said at a groundbreaking event in October for the quantum computer.
Priem’s latest pledge will cost $95 million to bring the computer to campus and establish a new center, something he calls, in his words, laying the groundwork on the “glide path to zero . ”
«This weekend is actually the completion of our foundation ,» Priem said at the ribbon-cutting event, where he explained to a crowd packed with students, faculty, alumni and other guests that his funding for the computer would be the last great gift and use of your foundation. most of the funds remaining from him. He made the announcement standing in front of a glittering “quantum chandelier ,” the heart of the upcoming quantum computer because it contains the quantum chip and is surrounded by intricate gold wiring to keep the 2,000-pound computer cool enough to operate , around -460 degrees Fahrenheit (-238 degrees Celsius) . The computer is expected to be operational sometime in spring 2024 and will be located beneath four stained glass windows in a former chapel.
Priem’s family foundation currently has $160 million in assets and is close to closing by 2031 , he says, but he’s not sure the money will last that long, given all the new initiatives he keeps deciding to fund at RPI. «We can’t stop spending, so it will probably be much sooner ,» says Priem, adding that «when the money runs out, I’ll be able to retire . «
